


Ice Cream and Bullion

by rokhal



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Demonic Possession, Ethical Dilemmas, Food, Gen, Money, Possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-19
Updated: 2019-12-19
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:27:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21856831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rokhal/pseuds/rokhal
Summary: Gabe hasn't seen his brother for six months. Robbie has an idea for how to put Gabe through college.Written as a birthday fic for soulofevil!
Relationships: Gabe Reyes & Robbie Reyes
Comments: 11
Kudos: 27





	Ice Cream and Bullion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [soulofevil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soulofevil/gifts).



> In which the Rider from AOS is just straight-up Zarathos from the Seventies Ghost Rider comics: a deposed Lord of Hell whose ego never deflated.

It was a soft mellow Sunday afternoon in November, and Gabe Reyes was supposed to be filling out scholarship applications, and applying for financial aid with which to pay the scholarship application fees. Instead he'd spent three hours—not that he'd noticed—compiling a massive spreadsheet of dates, locations, and bylines about every person in East Los Angeles who'd ever been burned, beaten, or run over by a car within the past five years.

The fosters wanted him to think about his future. How could Gabe care about some fantasy about becoming a software engineer or a civic planner or a social media consultant when his brother had disappeared after spending years as a homicidal demon-possessed vigilante right under Gabe's nose? And his uncle had died after escaping from prison and murdering a bunch of SHIELD agents in a power plant? What, for that matter, had his own parents been involved with that had gotten them killed when he and Robbie were kids? What was wrong with his family?

It couldn't be a good thing that they were all gone.

He'd worry about college when he'd figured the Ghost Rider out. He wasn't sure he'd bother unless he got a hell of a scholarship, anyway; wasn't like he could get one for soccer, ha-ha.

His social email account popped an alert in the corner of his screen, and his eyes darted to it. He caught his breath.

426hellcat@yahoo.com. That was one of Robbie's email accounts. What Robbie was doing emailing him instead of just sending a fucking text—

Assuming it _was_ Robbie. Gabe squinted at the pop-up as it faded away. It could be some SHIELD agent. It could be the demon. It could be the NSA or worse.

Or it could just be Robbie, because who would go to the effort of interrogating a man who could catch on fire and punch through walls just to talk to a high school student who wasn't even a hacker. Gabe read the email.

 _I went to our place but you don't live there anymore,_ it said. No shit. Gabe was seventeen with no legal guardian and had no way of paying Tio's mortgage. _I brought you something. We don't have to talk. Please reply within the next thirty minutes before I have to leave the library. If not I'll check this account every day for as long as I can._

Gabe's hands shook as he typed the reply. _Bullshit we don't need to talk. I'm at 513 San Marino. Get here._

* * *

Not even twenty minutes later, he heard the antique rumble of Tio's Charger rolling down the street outside the foster home. Gabe glared at the pile of clothes his roommate had left on the floor right where the door needed to open, set the brakes on the chair, and shoved them aside with the grabby stick he used to reach things on shelves. Then he wheeled out to the living room.

Mr. Mendoza sat on the couch “watching” football. His sharp eyes flickered between Gabe and the screen. “Where are you off to?”

Gabe opened and shut his mouth. “My brother's here to pick me up” wouldn't fly, because the reason he was in Foster Care was that Robbie was missing and presumed dead. “A friend” also wouldn't fly, because with the kids Mr. Mendoza worked with, “friends” with cars were either agents of their incompetent yet possessive parents, or predators. “Army recruiter,” Gabe said, and winced.

“Oh?”

“Drone program?” Gabe suggested.

“Ugh,” Mr. Mendoza groaned.

“He's taking me out to lunch.”

“It's four in the afternoon, Gabriel, try again.”

“Uh, dinner?” He elaborated. “He says he likes my work ethic and my attention span, and clearly I can tolerate sitting for long periods—”

“Ugh,” the foster repeated. “I don't think I can legally refuse to let you go with him. But I think this is a terrible idea. Don't sign anything. When do you plan to come back?”

“Dunno. Uh, six? I'm just getting some information,” Gabe said, his voice cracking. He heard Robbie's steps on the concrete outside and wheeled to the door, opened it.

There he was, a black streak against pale concrete and dead grass, the white hoodie poking out of the collar of his striped jacket, his brow furrowed, his eyes heavy: there was Robbie, or what looked like Robbie, exactly as he'd been the day Gabe had last seen him, the day he'd told him that fairytale about dying and selling his soul that turned out to be a horror story that was true.

“Don't hug me,” Gabe hissed, rolling out hastily and shutting the door behind him.

Robbie nodded, his eyes screwed shut.

“I told my foster you're a military recruiter. If you do anything weird, he'll think you're a sex trafficker. Help me in and get me back by six.”

“Got it,” Robbie said. His voice was deeper than Gabe remembered. Rough. When Robbie opened the Charger's passenger door for him and lifted him into the seat, he didn't snug him up tight to his chest like he used to, and Gabe felt unbalanced, almost fell. Gabe shut the door himself, buckled himself in while Robbie stowed his chair in the trunk. The Charger smelled weird, new car scent and leather conditioner.

“Where was the car?” Gabe asked when Robbie got in.

“No se. Auction house maybe.” Instead of starting the car, Robbie just stared ahead out the windshield. “I guess I stole it.”

“You gonna drive?”

“Sure.” Robbie put the Charger in gear and they headed off, turning up and down streets apparently at random, until they got on Atlantic Boulevard heading South and Gabe realized they were drifting back toward their old neighborhood.

He leaned back in the seat and rubbed his eyes. The smell was all wrong, but the hum and vibration of the engine was just how he remembered it, Robbie was close enough to touch, and if he didn't watch himself, he'd find himself pretending everything was right and normal like it had been before Robbie's confession. But that time had never been real. Tio had always been a time bomb, and ever since the accident, Robbie had been killing people once or twice a month and washing the blood off his hands into the sink they'd shared.

He opened his eyes to find Robbie staring at him. Gabe looked away, then back. Now Robbie was watching the road, his mouth tight. This was horrible. He had questions. He had accusations. He had to start somewhere. Instead the tension just built and built in his arms and chest and throat until he felt like he would either punch him or pass out.

Robbie spoke first. “I know I'm the last person you want to see.”

 _No,_ Gabe thought, but he couldn't quite say that he wanted to see Robbie, either. Robbie had become a wound in his soul, a question he was afraid to learn the answer to, and he hated it.

“I just got a little free time. Wanted to see you, Lucy, the old place. Uh, Earth.”

“Earth?”

“Earth.” The evening sun danced over Robbie's knuckles as he hauled the wheel through a right-hand turn onto Hillrock Lane. “Are you doing all—you hanging in there?”

“Yeah I'm hanging in there,” Gabe said, the surreality of the conversation making his words light as his thoughts circled. _Earth?_ “I'm an orphan in foster care. My roommate collects plastic knives and makes shivs out of them and leaves his shit all over our floor. After my birthday I'm either going to magic myself up a job that pays the rent, get a full-ride scholarship that includes summer housing, or go on disability for the rest of my life. Tio's estate is in probate because he didn't leave a will and apparently we've got cousins in Honduras who want a piece. La vida buena.”

Robbie's fists clenched. “If I had a choice I never would have left.”

Gabe latched on to this. “Explain that to me. What choices do you have?”

“The thing inside me,” Robbie began, hoarse. Gabe's inner voice, sarcastic, parroted him, even though Gabe knew that the Thing inside Robbie was terribly real. “It has an agenda. It, sort of, fixes things. It doesn't have a body, so it needs me to tie It to whatever plane and location It wants to be in. Right now It can't think of anywhere It wants to go, so It let me come here.”

“Why now?”

“What do you mean?”

Gabe clenched his teeth. “Why is it jerking you around like this _now?_ What about last year. Between the accident and you disappearing. Why now?”

Robbie hunched. “I had to change our deal.”

“So you made it _worse?!_ ”

Robbie shrugged.

“You made a deal with the devil,” Gabe said, “ _twice._ And you didn't get out of it.”

“It was going to take someone else. A good guy. He didn't deserve that.”

“ _You're_ a good guy,” Gabe exploded. “ _You_ don't deserve this.” And in that moment, Gabe believed it: Robbie was good. Robbie was kind. Robbie was his goddamn hero, and the fact that he'd spent night after night soaking Hillrock Heights in blood and burning it with hellfire was a bizarre anomaly whose significance Gabe could never hope to analyze with newspaper articles and judge with cost-benefit analysis. Robbie was a good guy and Gabe didn't need to know differently.

“I do deserve this,” Robbie said, and that was such a melodramatic thing to say that suddenly Gabe was itching for his spreadsheet again.

“So why are you here,” he challenged. “If you're such a bad guy who deserves eternal torment.”

He'd meant it as a joke, but Robbie didn't laugh. “Brought you something.”

“What, a souvenir?”

A nod.

“From space?” Gabe couldn't help being intrigued.

A grim smile. “Try again.”

“From Hell?”

A tiny little nod. Robbie slowed the car and parked on the street, and Gabe realized they were right across from the auto shop Robbie used to work at.

“What, seriously?”

“Yeah,” Robbie said. He scratched the back of his head, staring out the side window at the auto shop. “I mean, I guess you could call it Hell. It's another dimension that the, It, It's from. Less Dante, more...New Jersey? We were down there for weeks settling scores. And, um, un-freezing Its assets and kicking squatters out of Its mansion. It used to be a pretty big deal down there, and now It's got me, It's been getting its own back. So It tells me.”

Gabe felt nauseated. “It's using you for muscle?”

“Yeah,” Robbie said, calm.

“You're just taking Its word that It's doing the right thing.”

Robbie shrugged again. Shifted from butt-cheek to butt-cheek in his seat as he fished around in his pants pockets, and came up with three shiny metal bricks, each the size of a pack of cards. “Here. These are for you.” He dumped them into Gabe's hands, and Gabe almost dropped them.

They were heavy. He'd been expecting aluminum, they were so bright and white, but instead, the three little bricks together weighed as much as a gallon of milk. Gabe held one up to the light: it was milled perfectly smooth, with no dents or defects on the edges. One face of each brick bore rows of molded hash-marks that reminded him of Sumerian cuneiform, and the other face had a scene right out of a Heironymous Bosch painting. Gabe made out a little humanoid figure screaming as another, slightly smaller humanoid figure was stuffed head-first up its ass by a gang of skeletons. “Is this Hell money?”

Robbie nodded.

“How'd you get this?”

“Hell bank.”

Gabe weighed the little brick on his palm. It was shockingly dense. “This better not be plutonium or something.”

“Claro que no,” Robbie assured him. “Those are platinum.”

Gabe dropped the brick into his lap. “¡Santo cielo!”

Robbie chuckled. Grinned a little, for the first time today.

“Robbie, the fuck am I supposed to do with five pounds of platinum?” Gabe demanded.

“Sell it.”

“To who?” Gabe demanded. “How do I explain where these came from? What the fuck!”

“I don't know,” Robbie grumbled. “Figure it out. I didn't have a lot of time.”

“How'd you even get these?”

“It gave them to me. It's got a vault full of them; when we finally got the keys back we rolled around in there like Scrooge McDuck.”

Gabe stared down at the ingots weighing down the seat between his legs like they might be burning him. “Why'd It give some to you?”

“I asked nicely.”

“Don't tough-guy me. I'm not an idiot, you and this thing are not friends. What did It want?”

“Can't remember,” Robbie said.

“Bull _shit,_ ” Gabe snapped.

Robbie met his eyes, finally. Gabe was not looking at his headstrong, happy-go-lucky brother who claimed all he needed in life were cars to repair and cars to race; instead he saw a man in despair, crushed by something he could not hope to fight. Robbie's eyes glowed suddenly, and Gabe jerked backward. He'd almost forgotten that the thing inside Robbie was present just as surely as Robbie himself, listening to their conversation, looking at him.

The light faded, and Robbie lowered his head and massaged his temples. “I gave it a memory,” Robbie explained, hoarse. “It just told me. I don't know which one, because I, uh, traded it for the money.”

“You're cutting yourself apart,” Gabe murmured, aghast. “You didn't just sell your body, you're giving it pieces of _you_.”

“You need to understand I'm not getting out of this,” Robbie said. “I just wanted you to live. That's why I'm in this mess, I wanted you to live, and I...couldn't put my anger aside. And now I can't—” Robbie hissed in a breath and rubbed one eye with his palm. “I fucked up bad and I'm sorry. I never should've taken you out that night. You don't have to forgive me, just...I'm so sorry, Gabe. I fucked up your life and now I can't even be there. You're going to college, right? You and Tio, you were always talking math at the dinner table even when you were like twelve—”

As Robbie rambled apologies, Gabe felt fury rising in him again. “Stop. Robbie? Stop.”

Robbie stopped. Stared down at his knees.

“Stop using me to punish yourself,” Gabe snarled.

“I'm not using you—”

“You use me as an excuse to kill people!” The words wouldn't stop, like pus from a wound. “They're dead because of me. You're throwing your life away for me! You're a monster, because _I_ insisted on coming with you that night! I didn't ask for any of that!” He shook one of the platinum ingots at Robbie. “This shit? I don't want this! I want you! I want you to be a human being, and have a life you can be proud of, and always, _always,_ you find a way to push that onto me.”

Robbie stared at him, and Gabe saw his eyes glow again. He didn't look away.

“I want my brother, maldito,” Gabe growled, though his spine was tingling with the urge to fling himself out of the car and run, somehow, far away.

“You're right that I started because of you,” Robbie said, the glow still flickering. His voice was tight with pain. Gabe forced himself to listen. “It took you getting hurt, for me to see...I joked with those guys. I raced with them. They'd come by the shop, come by the bar, I saw them around, and everyone knew what they did—they didn't _know,_ but everyone knew Los Treces were bad news. There's cliqas, y _cliqas_ , y Los Treces...they were the cliqa El Eme called in to murder witnesses and defectors. Los Treces were killers for hire, and I was friendly with them because some of them were into racing.

“But they tried to kill you. They killed me. It could've been any innocent kid in a car, you know? But it was you. And if it wasn't you, and I wasn't dead, I think I'd still smile and shake hands with them. It wasn’t ‘till it was _you_ —”

Gabe couldn’t take this shit anymore. “Don’t blame me you decided to be a murdering vigilante!”

“They were killing people!” Robbie shouted. “That’s what it meant to be Los Treces! ¡Mata-niños! ¡Mata-inocentes! ¡Mata-mujeres! Todos Los Treces made their initiation with their eyes open. But I had my eyes closed until they came after you. Because I was selfish and didn’t want to see.”

“So you killed them.”

“Yes. The Rider—we killed them.”

“They’re people, too,” Gabe insisted. “What about their families—”

“What about the families of the kids they killed,” Robbie countered. “What about the terror. Knowing whatever El Eme does, you can’t ever go to the cops because if you do, Los Treces will come to your door. They deserved it, Gabe. I couldn’t stop the Rider, and I went after them in anger because, yes, I was fucking furious about what they did to you, and I know it’s wrong to kill for revenge, but I don’t regret it and I never will. Everyone the Rider sends me after because they murder or rape, it’s because of them and their choices.” Robbie took a harsh wet-sounding breath.

“That's not your job,” Gabe said.

“Is now.”

“No.” Gabe felt his own eyes prickling, his throat locking up. He pointed across the console, out Robbie's window and across the street at the open street-side garage doors of Canelo's Auto And Body. “That's your job. You said it made you happy. You said that was all you wanted.”

“I don't get that life anymore,” Robbie said, meeting his eyes. “I've accepted that.”

Gabe glared at him, turning one heavy platinum brick over and over in his fingers. “Sure. Fine. Where do I sign up?”

Robbie shot upright. “What?”

“How do I get my own Rider. Punish the wicked, see the universe, free medical.” Words felt like woodchips in his mouth. “Job security.”

The glow returned behind Robbie's eyes as they went wide with horror. “Don't joke about that.”

“Why not,” Gabe demanded. “You know how rare it is to get a full-ride scholarship with room and board, even with my SAT score? You know how hard it is to find accessible summer jobs?” He waved the brick, flashing sunlight in Robbie's face. “Nice thought but it's not practical. I've looked at my options and they're pretty grim. And I'm the last Reyes left. We've cursed or something, might as well accept my fate.”

“You're trying to make a point,” Robbie said, slumping.

“Did it work?”

Robbie tilted his head from side to side, flinching occasionally. “Yeah,” he said at last.

“So you know why I'm pissed at you.”

“I'm part of a monster,” Robbie replied. “I kill people. And I've given up.”

Gabe opened and shut his mouth. Robbie's summary was tantalizingly close to the truth as he saw it, but he couldn't articulate where Robbie was wrong. Or maybe Gabe was wrong: he wasn't pissed off. He was grieving.

Robbie was sitting a foot away from him and Gabe was grieving him.

“What if I don't sell these,” Gabe said, raising a platinum brick. “It's too complicated to figure out how, and I don't think I could convince anyone I found them under a rock. And you paid for this with your memories. It'd be like selling you.”

“Think of something!” Robbie demanded. “You're not selling me! I'm not dead, I'm right here—or out there, somewhere. Let me help you.”

“Help yourself first.”

Robbie took a breath and stopped, several times. “It's not like that.”

“Think of something,” Gabe snapped, as the glow returned to the backs of Robbie's eyes. “Yeah, I see you,” he told the Rider. “If you weren't worried you wouldn't care.”

“Don't provoke It,” Robbie protested.

“Okay, how about this,” Gabe said, waving the brick again. “You promise you won't give up your mind, body, and soul to that thing, and I promise I won't drop these stupid things into a storm drain.”

“You’re not dropping them down a storm drain,” Robbie said. “Just don’t hide them in your sock drawer.”

“So it’s a deal.”

“What deal?”

“I figure out how to put your Hell money in a bank account, and you...” Gabe’s words failed him. Stop killing people? Renegotiate with the demon that literally held his soul? Stay in LA? “Figure out how to stay you,” he said at last. “Don’t ever sell yourself again.”

“Ship’s sailed,” Robbie remarked. “But. I.” He winced, the Rider probably burning him behind the eyes again. “I’ll keep trying to work something out.”

Gabe nodded. He felt a sharp stab of disappointment—Robbie was already trying, and this was as much as he’d been able to manage so far. A day of shore leave and selling his mind for money.

Robbie drummed his thumbs on the steering wheel and cleared his throat. “You want some Michoacana?”

“Sounds great,” Gabe said, shutting his eyes and leaning back against the seat rest. Robbie put the car back in drive and they headed two blocks down to the ice cream parlor. La Michoacana had the same cheery pink sign and red umbrellas out front, where they used to sit outside gnawing on ice cream bars after Gabe's occupational therapy appointments, and before that after Gabe's soccer games, and before that in the dim and distant past every Saturday afternoon after Papí got home from work, and whenever one or both of them had been having a rough time but temporarily preferred to smooth it over with sugar instead of conversation.

They parked at the curb, and Gabe stuffed the heavy platinum bars in his jacket pockets, paranoid that they might slither their way out of his pants pockets and he wouldn't notice because of the nerve damage. Robbie got out and helped him transfer to the chair, holding him firm and steady against his chest this time, and then they made their way into the cheery storefront to the glass cases, the multicolored tubs of helado and walls of ice cream bars wrapped in wax paper. The flavors had rotated since the last time Gabe had been here, and the woman at the counter was new; she just smiled and waved, didn't remark “Mucho tempo sin vertes,” or “I thought you died.”

Gabe pointed out a dulce de leche bar with a cookie embedded in it. Robbie ordered his usual single scoop of sweet cream with no toppings. Gabe stared at his ice cream bar, wrapped in a square of brown paper and sitting on the glass counter just below his eye level, as Robbie handed over his credit card.

The woman ran the chip twice, tried swiping in both directions. “Lo siento. You got another card to put this on?”

Gabe groaned. Robbie cursed very quietly, and dug through his wallet, patted his pockets. Came up with two crumpled dollar bills and a few quarters. Gabe got out his own wallet and dug through it, the platinum bars clinking with his movements. He had seven dollars, left-over earnings from tutoring sophomores.

“Can you take the scoop off?” Robbie asked.

Gabe smacked him in the leg and shoved his money at the cashier. “Ignore him.”

When Robbie was penniless with an ice cream in each hand, they left the store, thanked the lady, and claimed a table next to a man, a woman, a toddler in a pink dress and a little girl in a fluorescent orange soccer uniform. Robbie dragged a chair aside so Gabe could get to the table, handed Gabe his ice cream bar, and sat heavily. He took a lick of his single scoop of sweet cream and his eyes rolled back in his head. Gabe watched the toddler bounce from side to side on her chair as her mother fed her spoonfuls of shave-ice, and the older girl carefully lick the drips off her cone with a grave expression. In the corner of his eye, Robbie leaned back and stared up at the hazy blue sky.

The dulce de leche bar was perfect, salty and sweet.

“Some army recruiter you are,” Gabe remarked, half-way through his ice cream and almost to the cookie at the base. The napkin around the stick was soaked and his fingers were sticky.

“Huh?” Robbie asked. “Oh. Right. No steak dinner, sorry. The Rider thinks I should just crack open an ATM.”

Gabe suddenly wondered what Robbie and the Rider were, from a practical rather than a moral standpoint—what could they do? How did it work? “But you're not going to?”

Robbie shook his head. “Told It it's stupid. And It's not desperate.”

“So It doesn't just do whatever It wants,” Gabe confirmed. “You have some input.”

Robbie's eyes glowed, and he winced and shoved the remains of his sweet cream scoop and half his sugar cone into his mouth.

“Sorry,” Gabe said.

“It does whatever It wants, It just didn't want to pay for ice cream,” Robbie managed, after chewing, swallowing, and shaking off what looked like a wicked brain-freeze. “I take care of any human shi—” His eyes cut to the kids at the next table. “Stuff.”

“So It needs you alive, for some things.”

“It won't let me die, no.”

“No, it needs _you._ ” Gabe reached over, nudged Robbie on the arm. 

“I wouldn't say need,” Robbie said, preemptively wincing before the Rider could even start to show behind his eyes. “It's complicated.”

“Okay,” Gabe said. He worked his way down to the ice cream bar, bit the cookie out from one side, caught the rest of the bar in the napkin before it fell off the stick. It was a cinnamon cookie. His head hurt as it froze the roof of his mouth, and he chewed fast. It distracted him from the spent-adrenaline from seeing Robbie, fearing Robbie, being afraid for Robbie, and left him with just the relief that Robbie was still here, himself, at this moment. “Hey. Rider,” he said, and Robbie sighed and shook his head. Gabe ignored him. “Thanks for bringing my brother back to life,” he said, pushing down on the _fuck you for making him party to your homicidal rampages._ “He's the best person I know. You got lucky when you found him, so...don't hurt him. Don't change him. Okay? Please. Let him go.”

“It doesn't plan to let me go,” Robbie said, watching the kids at the next table. The girl in the soccer uniform was carefully nibbling the edges of her sugar cone so they were perfectly level with the remaining ice cream. “But I think it just started counting my mental health as one of Its assets.”

“I'll take it for now,” Gabe said, and finished his ice cream bar. “How long are you here?”

“Dunno,” Robbie said, leaning back and shutting his eyes. “Could be an hour, could be a week. I had to see you first this time.”

What Gabe hated most about the last time he'd seen Robbie, was not knowing that Robbie was about to vanish into indentured servitude for six months. He'd given him the exact opposite of a real goodbye. “Take care of yourself,” he said. “Keep in touch.”

“I'll do what I can,” Robbie promised.

They sat in the sun with their crumpled napkins, watching the people and the traffic and the jets that made a hash of contrails overhead, two humans bound by human bonds, in a city of millions more humans, together for now.


End file.
